Seeing that a couple of my columns have made their way to The Barrow News-Journal’s website, I was intrigued by one of the comments my abortion piece got.
Because I am pro-life, believing that government should not have the right to dictate who lives or dies, especially without due process of law, one of my readers mentioned being curious about whether or not I was in favor of the death penalty.

Although I have always been pro-life in regards to both abortion and the death penalty, I can say that there can be a good libertarian argument made for both sides of the death penalty.
On the one side, where I fall, government should not have the right to deprive a person of the right to life, even with due process of law.
The reason I fall in this category is because of the reality of false convictions.
Believe it or not, but government doesn’t always get it right, and because of human error, innocent people get convicted of crimes they didn’t commit while guilty people get to walk free.
To be honest, I prefer the latter rather than the former.
Here’s why: Aside from Jesus, Liberty is the greatest gift given to mankind by God himself.
It is the reason He placed the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden — so that we may freely choose Him.
I believe that only God Himself has the right to end another individual’s life (unless the individual decides this for him or herself), with the exception of one acting in self-defense.
As mentioned above, human error means that some people will be wrongly convicted.
For this reason, there is no justification for the death penalty.
I see both sides of politics— the right and the left — arguing their cases for different things and declaring “if it saves just one life, we should try it!”
This goes for both the drug war and gun control, amongst other things.
The problem with this is that a lot of people on both sides, although admittedly the right is more likely to believe this, argue in favor of the death penalty and ignore the fact that innocent people get convicted and sentenced to death.
If you favor the war on drugs, gun control, or even implied consent laws based at all on the idea that you could save at least one life, then how could you justly advocate for the death penalty?
Let’s go back to the year of 1999 in the state of Illinois when Anthony Porter was finally exonerated of a crime in which he did not commit.
Porter had been convicted in 1982 for the murder of two teens.
While it is reported that Porter was a gang member at the time of the murder, multiple witnesses came forward to name another suspect, Alstory Simon, as the perpetrator; however, police chose to pursue charges only against Porter.
While Porter had been denied appeal after appeal, it was not until he was tested for mental capacity and reaching an IQ of only 51 when the appeals were granted.
Porter had been just two days shy of his execution when his attorneys were able to get him a stay, and finally after working with students of Journalism at Northwestern University had gotten him exonerated of the charges.
After Porter’s exoneration, another man came forward having confessed to committing the crime of which Porter had been convicted.
That man was Alstory Simon, the other suspect that had been named that police refused to pursue.
George Ryan, the Governor of Illinois at the time of the exoneration, commuted every death row inmate’s sentence to life term sentences just days before leaving office.
While he believed that the death penalty would be an acceptable form of punishment for heinous crimes, he did not think that such a punishment could be carried out justly if it meant that innocent lives would be terminated.
This is something that we should consider in today’s society, as punishments do not always fit the crimes carried out, and not all criminalizing laws are just.
I am not saying that heinous crimes would not fit such a punishment, but I am saying that man is fallible, that human error can never fully be squandered out of our nature.
I am therefore against the death penalty.

Jessica Swords is a local columnist. She can be reached at jlswords1998@aol.com.

Well said Jessica. My only disagreement with you is the idea of human fallibility. While that may be a good reason to oppose the death penalty, I contend that even if we know it is an absolute factual it is still immoral for the government to take human life. The idea of the government killing people puts the government (you and me) in the same mindset as the killer. You say that our reason for killing is better, but in the mind of the killer he may think his reason is justified. My spouse is sleeping with someone, someone owes me money etc... To quote the John Prine song Your Flag Won't Get You Into Heaven Anymore, "Jesus don't like killing no matter what the reason for".

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